New York
Nirmali Fenn
The work of Sri Lankan-born, Australian composer Nirmali Fenn is shaped by a life lived across continents, cultures, and forms of belonging. Her compositions respond to a life in motion, exploring home as a shifting perception and the search for belonging not bound to place.
Fenn’s portrait CD, released by Kairos, was praised as “dynamic and sculpturally fluid,” exploring the “poetics of spacetime thematic resonance.” Fenn’s work has been commissioned by New Music USA, the Juilliard School, UnitedBerlin, Fondation Royaumont, and performed by the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Cairn, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Melbourne Symphony, Ensemble Linea and Trio Radial. She has been composer-in-residence at major festivals in Europe and the U.S., including Zeitströme Darmstadt and Yarn/Wire.
Fenn sees music as a tool for resistance, empathy, and spatial awareness, enabling listeners to perceive surroundings through sonic vibration and performers to “see” with their ears.
New York
Sunny Knable
Sunny Knable is an award-winning composer, a multi-instrumental performer, an educator, and an author of multiple published essays. Knable’s music has been described as “genius” (Anchorage Press), “great!” (TheWholeNote), “well-crafted” (New York Concert Review), “entertaining” (Audiophile Audition), “witty, romantic and lilting” (TheaterScene.net), and offering up “sparks of color and inventiveness” (Sacramento Bee). His prolific output is widely performed, including works for solo, chamber, orchestral music, and opera. Dr. Knable is an Assistant Professor of Music at Central Connecticut State University and Music Director of The Church-in-the-Gardens. He is a graduate of CSU Sacramento, Queens College, and Stony Brook University. His discography includes his debut album, “American Variations,” on Centaur Records; his second composition album with bassoonist Scott Pool and pianist Natsuki Fukasawa, “Song of the Redwood Tree,” on MSR Classics; and his third composition album, “Keys,” featuring Faythe Vollrath and Matthew Lau, on Trouvère Records. His bassoon works, Song of the Redwood-Tree, The Busking Bassoonist, and Reflection of a Life are published by TrevCo Music. He is the editor of the books “Looking Within: The Music of John Palmer” and Dan Weymouth’s “In Thrall,” and the author of “The Quarantine Chronicle of a Composer” on Vision Edition, UK.
Copenhagen
Sophie Søs Meyer
Sophie Meyer works from a sense of being within a landscape of people, history, tradition, nature, and sounds – a landscape where her music is already present before she intervenes. In her work, tradition plays an important role as an immediate sense of community and connectedness – an emotional fusion of multiple relations across time and space. Her ambition is to take this energy of her own cosmological longing for connectedness and translate it into music that others can listen to. She strives not to answer any questions, but rather to put her own questions into music.
When she composes, she often starts from a visual element that works as a prism to create components, which she transforms into sound. In Sophie Meyer’s creative process, her most important method is to listen and fully immerse herself in the material in search for a new layer of music. To her, composing is about staying curious to the world and to her own music as something she can touch, awaken and let live its own life – a life which oftentimes surprises even herself.
Aarhus
Santiago Rueda-García
Santiago is an artist, musician, composer and bassist from Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia and based in Aarhus, Denmark. The focus of his artistic work is on the exploration of the timbral variability of sound and its narrative/expressive quality; his oeuvre is strongly rooted in concepts like time, nature, and emotions like anxiety and nostalgia. In his compositions sound behaves as an almost-living entity that moves, slowly, and works as a means of expression and conceptual foundation of the narrative.
Besides his activity as a new-music composer, he has worked as music composer and sound editor for podcasts and films that have been screened and prized in festivals in Colombia, Argentina, Germany, Iceland, France, among others. Santiago has a bachelor’s in music with specialization in composition and arrangements from Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga (Bucaramanga, Colombia); a Master of Arts in Composition for Film, TV and Games from the University of Chichester (Chichester, UK); and a Master’s in composition from Listáháskoli Íslands (Reykjavík, Iceland).
New York
Derek Weagle
Musician/Educator/Wearer-of-Many Hats Derek J. Weagle (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based artist and healer working in the medium of sound. Seeking the deepest joy in all things, they are invested in the disruption of cultural barriers around music-making, preserving it as a vital act of humanness. With a practice rooted in syncretism, Derek’s musical and teaching styles draw from a wide breadth of experience, modality, and tradition. They are passionate about the fusion of these approaches as a means of authentic connection and collective healing.
Derek holds an M.M. with Academic Honors in Composition with a minor in Choral Conducting from the New England Conservatory and a B.M. in Music Education from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, an Artist Diploma in Composition from the Gabriela Ortiz Composing Studio at the OAcademy Music Conservatory, certificates in Sound Healing from the Sage Academy of Sound in Woodstock, NY, and in Biosonic Sound Repatterning with Dr. John Beaulieu.
Derek currently freelances as a sound healing practitioner and conductor while serving on faculty at Juilliard Extension teaching orchestration. Their work as a composer has received recognition both nationally and internationally, including the American Prize in Composition, the International Horn Society, and in the International Composition Competition Harelbeke.
New York
Ethan Cohn
Ethan Cohn is a bassist, composer, improviser, and educator from New York City. His work explores the intersections of composition and improvisation, acoustic and electronic sound, tradition and experimentation, and instrumental performance and interactive technology. Ethan holds a B.Mus. in Jazz Performance with a minor in Computer Science from McGill University and an M.M. in Performance and Composition from The New School. After several years immersed in Montreal’s music community, where he founded the psychedelic jazz-rock group The Plastic Waste Band and released three albums of original music, he participated in the Focusyear Basel international jazz residency. He later co-founded Ensemble Infinity, releasing an EP and a full-length album before returning to New York in 2021.
New York / Aarhus
Andrea Christie / Anne Sophie Andersen
Aegira Duo contributes a new co-composed work to Synesthesia & Ritual — a centerpiece for the program inspired by the transformational passage between the Chinese zodiac’s Wood Snake and Fire Horse years. Drawing on their shared practice of improvisation and their complementary approaches to collaborative composition, Andrea Christie and Anne Sophie Andersen bring their own voices as composers into dialogue for the first time.
